Blair Witch Project Director Open To Releasing Extended Cut

On September 16th, one of the most influential and iconic horror movies of all time gets a follow-up in the form of Blair Witch, a years-later sequel that centers on one man’s quest to uncover what happened to his missing sister (Heather) back in the 1990s. With the franchise once again in the limelight, could we someday soon see the much-talked-about extended cut of the original classic?

As hardcore fans of The Blair Witch Project should know by now, the film ran 2 1/2 hours long when it was publicly screened for the first time, but was eventually cut down to just 81-minutes. In total, directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick walked away from the shoot with an incredible 19-hours of footage, and speaking with the Found Footage Files Podcast this week, Sanchez revealed that the eventual release of an extended cut, edited together from all that never-before-seen content, is not entirely out of the question.

“During the original process of the editing of the film we started off with a 3 hour cut and then we trimmed it down to about 2.5 hours, and that was the first time we showed it to an audience,” Sanchez told the podcast. “We knew it was way too long. We knew we were going to have to cut at least an hour out of the movie. So we showed the movie and it was a good reaction. It was definitely too long, but that was really the first time where people had seen it like that and just kind of experienced this thing, which was a 2.5 hour version of Blair Witch.”

“I think unfortunately the 2.5-hour version that we screened originally we haven’t been able to find anywhere,” he continued. “That’s just what happens when you have to reuse Beta SP tapes because you have no money. We’d have to go back and figure out where the files are and all that stuff. And it would be a nightmare. But yeah, I think in a couple of weeks I could probably take the original movie and edit a longer version if I wanted to. I know the fans are like ‘everybody wants to see it.’ It would be cool to do, honestly. I wouldn’t hesitate to do that if for some reason Lionsgate hired me to do that. I think it would a lot of fun.”